By mohamedj.bah@awokonewspaper.sl
Freetown, SIERRA LEONE – The Project Coordinator for Freetown the Tree Town, Lyndon Baines- Johnson has said that forest fire and land grabbing are among the key causes in the Western Area affecting tree planting in the catchment areas in Freetown and its environs.
Mr. Baines- Johnson was speaking to the press during a community engagement, they had with residents of Dworzark Community on the tree planting campaign.
“As a project, we have been planting trees for the past two years or so started in 2020 and 2021. “Our target is to plant one million trees,” he stated.
He said out of such a target, they have succeeded in planting about 657,000 trees , with about 343,000 trees more to plant.
With Funding from NaCSa under the Productive Social Safety Net and Youth Employment Project, they have started the engagement with Community Based Organisations, to complete the process, due to the fact that Freetown City Council will not be able directly to planting those tress, but the community organisations.
He said it is important for the communities to be involved and understand what they want to do as a whole and more importantly for the communities to be able to identify safe planting spaces wherein these trees should be safe.
Over the years, he said they have been planting trees in the catchment areas in the Aberdeen Creek, Guma Dam, Charlotte Dam, Jui and some other places, where people are cutting those trees claiming the land belong to them rather than the government.
“We are using tree tracking system to monitor these tress. Out of the first phase of trees which they have planted, which is 557,000, “we have had 443,920 that have survived.’
Even though Freetown had lost over 100,000 trees within the shortest possible time, he said they have succeeded in replacing 50% of those trees.
He said they will continue to engage the government at a higher level, in order to protect the forest, mangrove and other catchment areas.
Eugenia Kargbo from City Council said that climate change is affecting cities across the world and extreme heat poses serious challenge to the city of Freetown.
She said in order to reduce climate change in the country, “we should continue doing what we have started doing to reduce such, as one of those things is by developing a climate action plan , which is an umbrella strategy for what we need to do to reduce climate change but also to mitigate climate change as well .”
The plan she said focuses on some of the things which will have already experiencing like flooding, land slides and mud slides, but also heat which is also a major component.
“We had different interventions and targets to see how best the issue of climate change can be best address.
“One of the biggest challenge we have, which is not only in Freetown but Africa is data , we don’t have enough data to really help us to understand the lock context . We have data that are available online and one you will see to build the bench mark, but you really need to understand what is happening within your environment”
The activities of man he said is affecting the environment drastically leading to severe consequences.
One of the residents in the community, Mabinty Kamara thanked the organiser for the engagement, noting that from now onwards she will be planting trees in her compound. MJB/29/3/2023
